P(n) = λne-λ over n! is the formula for World Cup success

It may look complicated, but this is the mathematical formula that promises to take the frustration, misjudgment and wasted bets out of predicting football results.

The good news is that punters should now be able to win a fortune. But the bad news for England fans is that academic experts say that, mathematically, David Beckham and his teammates have little chance of winning the World Cup - just five per cent, to be exact.

Decision Technology, a firm of prediction experts who claim to be the best in the business, has invented a computer program that boasts a better record than any bookmaker, pundit or sports tipster. While most bookmakers rank England as second favourites behind Brazil to land football's greatest prize, Dectech ranks Sven-Goran Eriksson's side ninth in the list it has produced to estimate the chance each of the 32 teams has of lifting the trophy. Brazil have the highest probability at 13.1 per cent.

In a statement that will not readily make the first line of a new football chant, Dr Henry Stott, firm director and visiting fellow at Warwick University, said: 'Our modelling technique involves maximum likelihood estimation and a kind of rational probabilistic analysis to predict what the outcome of a match will be.'

The computer has studied the scorelines of 4,500 games between 200 countries since 2002 and come up with forecasts for every match at the initial group stage.

'England have an easy group and so an 80 per cent chance of reaching the knockout stages. After that the games against tough opposition such as Germany and Argentina come thick and fast. That's why we have made them only ninth favourites to win. With or without Wayne Rooney,' said Stott.

If the system is as accurate as its inventors claim - it has correctly called 53 per cent of Premiership matches since 2002, better than anyone else - fans can stop relying on hunches, advice from friends and listening, for example, to newspaper tipsters, who score a measly 43 per cent.

Stott says anyone seeking to make a profit on events in Germany should back France, Holland or the Czech Republic, whose chances, he says, have been underestimated.

According to Stott and his colleagues, a combination of science and mathematics shows that, after Brazil, the next nearest favourites are France, who did not score a goal at the last World Cup, Germany, who even Germans admit are an unexceptional team, and Holland.

For those with a degree in statistics: in the equation, 'n' is the number of goals scored, 'lambda' is the expected number of goals, 'e' is a natural logarithm and the exclamation mark is 'factorial', a function of 'n'. P is the probability distribution of goals scored. Well, we said you needed a degree.

'We knew we were on to something at the 2002 World Cup when, despite France being 10-1 on to beat Senegal, they lost - an outcome which we had said was a 25 per cent chance,' said Stott. He and his colleagues are so convinced they get it right more often than anyone else that they are betting £50,000 of their own money on their predictions.